An Act of Goodwill?

William Grosso @ August 8, 2006

In an intriguing post, Tim O’Reilly claims that one of the major reasons the first propelled the open source movement is disappearing. To wit,

As a result, one of the motivations to share — the necessity of giving a copy of the source in order to let someone run your program — is truly gone.

He then goes on to talk about strategies for open sourcing applications and mentions the following one:

Keep the app proprietary but open source the framework used to build it. Some examples include Basecamp: Ruby on Rails; Ellington: Django; DabbleDB: Seaside. You can also tease apart some of the most important tools originally developed for your app. For example, Livejournal: Memcached. Yahoo! and Google have done a lot of this. But as the argument between Matt and Jeremy illustrates, it’s now an act of goodwill rather than an act of necessity.

This strikes me as over-stated. At this point, Rails is a platform. More and more people outside 37 signals are developing for it (not on it, but for it). I’d venture to say that within a year more than half of Rails development will be done by people outside 37 signals.

And, of course, it’s already the case that most of the QA for Rails is done by the community.

This is an enormous economic boon to 37 signals. They’ve managed a great trick: they’re going to get a much better platform for much less work. Which will help their web applications business enormously.

I don’t know if open-sourcing Rails was a “necessity,” but I think defining it purely in terms of “goodwill” is a stretch.

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